The introduction challenges the conventional modernist approach by tracing the development of psychoanalytic discourse as a network of cultural systems dependent on commercial interests and connected through various authors, editors, publishers, printers, and readers. I explore the discursive ground that religion provided for the establishment of the contemporary “rules” of engaging in the field of psychoanalysis. The prewar period may anticipate postwar psychoanalytic literature on religion, but the journal wars, and the rivalries between the various players for control of the key publications play a much more central role in these works than various views on the role of religion in the psyche.